ic-games Review - Def Jam: Fight for New York - Reviews, Previews and Interviews for PC, Xbox 360, PS2, PS3 and Wii

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Def Jam: Fight for New York

Information
Reviewer: Casey
Developer: Aki Corporation
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Reviewed: Xbox
Genre: Wrestling / Fighting
UK Release: 01st Oct 2004
Article Date: 17th Jan 2005
Difficulty: Medium
Retail Price: £39.99
Price Comparison:
0

Score Breakdown

Experience:
Game Play:
Graphics:
Sound:
Overall Score: 88%

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Pros

Solid wrestling game with tons of bells and whistles.

You can finally show Bubba Sparxx what you think of him

Cons

A few minor graphical issues

Screenshots

4 of 19

Def Jam: Fight for New York is fun enough to make me wonder about the possibilities of rap stars filling out the casts of games from other genres. An extreme football game starring rappers seems almost obvious. How about a classy East Coast vs. West Coast first person shooter? Would Snoop and Method Man make good Jedi in KOTOR 3? The possibilities are endless. For the moment, however, we’re stuck with just a fighting game. And it’s a pretty good one, too.

DJ: FFNY is really a wrestling game boxed up to look like a fighting game. Though wrestling is only one of five fighting styles (the others being kickboxing, street fighting, martial arts, and submission), the game plays much more like a wrestling game than it does a traditional fighting game. However, being a wrestling game not based on any sort of wrestling, Def Jam pushes hard to stake its claim as one of the best wrestling games ever made. It succeeds, not by revolutionizing the fighting engine or by giving you flawless graphics, but rather by filling the game with tons of tiny little joys that add up to a very satisfying experience.

The first of these joys is probably the most obvious. The vast majority of the fighters are actual living rappers. Snoop feels like an old video game standby, but we’ve still got Busta Rhymes, Method and Red, Flava Flav, Fat Joe, Sean Paul, where do you want me to stop? There are tons. Even Lil Kim and Carmen Electra show up. I tried to count all the characters but lost track at one billion. They all lend their actual voices to the game and all, kind of surprisingly, do a fine job. Also, don’t forget the character creation (I’ll talk about it later) lets you bring your own dude to the fight, giving the game nearly endless character possibilities. Now I know in wrestling games they’ve been doing this for years, but something about pummeling Hulk Hogan is just not near as satisfying as pummeling Sean Paul. Sometimes this makes the game harder to play: Sure, I’ll kick the hell out of Bubba Sparxxx any day of the week, but breaking a shovel on Flava Flav? That just seems wrong. At least it’s the fun kind of wrong.

Next up are the arenas. Normally in a wrestling game you get a ring of some sort and then maybe a couple of gimmick arenas thrown in for giggles. Here, they’re almost all gimmick arenas. Fight in a subway station, an office building, a ring of fire, a strip club, a construction yard, etc. They’re all pretty cool, and almost all of them have very arena-specific weapons and environmental dangers. In the construction yard, the crowd will hand you 2x4’s or a pair of pliers. In the bar, they hold up glass bottles. They all work the same way (you smash them on the other guy) but the variety sure is nice. Whereas at the construction yard you can slam Ice-T into a front loader, at the bar you’ll have to settle with putting his head through a jukebox. You get the idea. A big crowd surrounds you at most locations, and they’ll be happy to grab onto anyone who wanders to far out of the arena and hold them down while you get a few good punches in. It’s all quite fun. Even better are the locations that have arena specific KO’s, like the subway station. Can you guess what it is or do I have to tell you? Sorry Snoop, tonight you’re getting hit by a train.

The fighting is the normal punch kick grapple block combination, and you’ll soon realize that punching and kicking are just there to give you something to do between grapples. Luckily the grapples pay off big time. All the environmental dangers, when combined with a grapple, are just about as brutal as you can get. You will be cringing as you slam Busta’s head into a huge concrete block. Several times. Even better are the blazin’ moves. If you start really wailing on a guy, you charge up a little meter, and then you can become blazin’ (we’ve seen this before.) However, all the blazing moves – one for each character in the game plus some – and in case you don’t remember that adds up to like three billion – look really great on screen. They are just like a wrestling game’s signature moves, but instead of say, a suplex, you can for example jump rope using your oponent’s body. All the moves are cool enough to make all the other people in the room say damn really loud. If it’s one on one, the game even freezes, matrix-style, right before the most devastating hits. So really the game amounts to trying to get enough hits in to go blazin’, and then show off your move. But it all works so well and looks so good that it feels like you really are a superstar rapper being thrown into your own SUV by your rival Warren G.

What else is good? The story mode is surprisingly excellent for a fighting/wrestling game. Character creation is cool for starters, you get to “describe” your fighter at the beginning to a police sketch artist. You pick a fighting style, and they all really do feel and look different, which is great. You can add other fighting styles later, which kind of adds better techniques to replace your old fighting style’s weaknesses. The story itself is really well done, as your fighter must take on a rival gang (led by Snoop) by fighting for control of clubs. You also get a girlfriend and stuff. The game, as many do, surely fizzles (that’s a real word, not Snoop slang) out by the disappointing ending, but all in all, the story is fun to watch. The voice acting is great, and all the rappers play some pretty fun characters. A standout is the insane Redman, who along with his good friend Method should have a video game of their own. In addition to all of that, between fights you can go and buy clothes and jewelry and tattoos and haircuts to make your fighter look meaner and tougher. There is tons of clothing and jewelry here, and you can make your dude look however you want him. Sure, a button-up shirt and dress pants looks cool, but then no one can see your tats. Better go with a tank top and rolled-up jeans for now. Again: it’s been done before, and it’s not necessary for a good game, but the addition of all this customization sure is nice. Oh, also, the more ice you wear, the better the crowd likes you, which means the faster you can do cool stuff in a fight, which means the more money you’ll earn to spend on more ice. And since you can bring your dressed-up fighter into multiplayer, he’d better look cool. Cause he’ll be up against Busta Rhymes. If Busta thinks you look lame, the fight is already half over…

The sound is fine. The punches and kicks are all standard, but sometimes the sound of Fat Joe’s head getting smashed into a concrete wall just sounds so dead-on. Of course, all the music is licensed stuff. It’s rap, if you hadn’t guessed. EA is always pretty good with music and they don’t disappoint here. The graphics all look pretty nice, especially the animations. Sometimes things get the slightest bit choppy, but it’s pretty infrequent. Also, sometimes the arenas obscure your view of what’s going on. A cheering crowd can get in the way of you seeing what they’re cheering for, which at that point is probably you getting wailed on. It’s avoidable and not that bad, but still, kind of annoying. Also, if you’re in some kind of 4-way match, and the two pairs are fighting at opposite ends of the arena, the camera has to pull back far enough to where it’s a little hard to see what’s going on, even on a huge tv. No big deal again. Just trying to find something to complain about.

One last thing: That M rating is certainly earned. While brutal violence, rampant objectification of women, a drive-by shooting or two, the occasional f-bomb, and death by subway train are all great stuff for a bunch of responsible adult gamers, the little kiddies may be unhealthily influenced. If violent videogames weren’t bad enough role models as it was, now we get to learn that if you are a brutal enough fighter, you get to make out with Carmen Electra. Luckily, all the rappers involved are playing characters in a cinematic struggle and seem to be having a great time, as they should. I just know it’s only a matter of time before a thirteen year-old “rapping fight club” gets blamed on gamers.

With all the bells and whistles, a game still lives or dies by how fun it is. Def Jam: Fight for New York is fun. Whether getting a bunch of friends together to answer the years old question, “who would win in a fight: Method Man or Redman?” or icing out your own fighter so he looks good throwing Busta through a windshield in the single player mode, you will surely find something to enjoy in the game. Hopefully it will keep you occupied until I convince EA to make Def Jam: Kart Racer.

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